Tips to reduce AdWords campaign costs

Cost Per Acquisitions (CPA) and Cost Per Clicks (CPC’s) are probably the most trickiest of the targets in PPC campaigns. Getting a low CPA requires lot of research and testing over time and the techniques differ from campaign to campaign, however, getting the basics right is the first step.

Let’s take a look at the tips you can employ to reduce the average CPA in any AdWords campaign.

1. Reduce the landing page load time

So, landing pages are the focus here. Making sure they are technically perfect is the most simple yet the important step you can take. Landing page load time is crucial as it directly affects your page’s quality score. Use tools like Pingdom or Google’s Page Speed Tool, to ensure that your landing pages are always super speedy.

2. Relevancy. Relevancy. Relevancy.

Content relevancy on your landing page should directly match the Ads and is directly proportional to your quality score. An Ad that has “Ladies’ shoes” in the title should be leading to a page related to ladies shoes, or else the quality score goes flat down. If there are many different content pieces on your websites, that are different in context, add different ad-groups that match up to the content. Diversification is the key.

3. Try A/B Testing or Multivariate testing and record the  best results

Google provides two excellent tools to help you figure out what people think is relevant on your website. A/B Testing and Multivariate Testing. Use the tools whenever you launch a new campaign and track the results. Sometimes the results can be completely different from what you might have thought, and often provides lot of insights about what works and what doesn’t in the campaigns.

Here is a great guide on how to use Google AdWords Website Optimiser.

4. Use Exact Keywords Match

One mistake lot of beginner’s make is to use broad match while estimating traffic, and going for the kill. In reality, their Ads would be showing up on a wide range of keywords, even the one’s that are not targeting the actual website. This will lead to depleting the budget for irrelevant keywords and reduce your quality score. So every time Google suggests those keywords, make sure they are exact searches.

5. Spread out your budget evenly over time

Most of us are right with this. As suggested, we spread out the budget evenly over time so that the ads are shown at all times, as opposed to showing more frequently at one particular period of time.

But this can also be the other way round. If you look into the “Dimensions” tab in your campaigns, you will be able to show the Ads based on particular time frames. Look at the previous history and see which time slots show the minimum conversion, and pause them off. You do not want to spend your money on low conversion time slots. This can significantly save a lot of money.

There are plenty of fine tuning you can do in your campaign settings to bring down your cost. The idea is to get better click through rates and better CPAs, as without any one of which, the campaign may go bloated.

What are your findings, have you found any fine tuning settings that can help bring down the costs in AdWords campaigns?